Séminaire de l'Observatoire de Recherche sur les États-Unis (ORUS) : Manuel Bocquier

This presentation investigates how ordinary listeners of old-time music in the 1930s and 1940s played music and participated in its commodification. It draws on a corpus of letters sent to two radio performers and producers of old-time music, a genre that evolved into country music later on. Rather than focusing on analyses of racial representation, southern regionalism, or nostalgia — topics central to the historiography of old-time music — I emphasize how listeners wrote and talked about the songs they composed, the instruments they played and the lyrics they sang. I study how they described their own musical skills and how these skills became entangled with commercial aspirations. It proposes a social history of musical practices that shifts attention from celebrated musicians to the everyday musical practices of their audiences. It also reframes old-time music not solely as a cultural object, but as a field in which listeners themselves understood music as a commodity and as a resource they could benefit from. I first look at the ordinary musical practices of old-time music listeners. I then examine cases of listeners who wrote songs and sought to publish them in order to earn money. I finally present requests for auditions and listeners who saw their musical skills as a potential financial resource.

Manuel Bocquier defended his Phd in history at the EHESS in January 2025 (“Racializing Race Music and Old-Time Music Audiences: A History of Segregation in the Interwar Period”). His work focuses on the segregation of ‘old-time music’ and ‘race music’ in the Twenties and Thirties in the United States. He studies the role of consumers, radio listeners, and jukebox users in this process. He has been teaching English and history at the university and is now teaching history in secondary school.